Auerbach, Tauba

Queen Sonja Print Award Jury 2018:

The jury has been deeply impressed by Tauba Auerbach’s substantial body of work and the way that printmaking and graphic art are fully integrated into her artistic practice. In painting, prints, and artists’ books that are at once conceptually rigorous and visually lush, she focuses on abstract patterns – both random and ordered – to explore the structures of logic and perception. From aquatints that play with the dot patterns used in commercial printing; to screenprints whose abstract patterns she made by combining various typographic elements; to an elaborate pop-up book full of colorful three-dimensional geometries; to an artist’s book whose pages are printed with every possible color in the RBG color scale, her work is consistently engaged with the aesthetic, conceptual, and technical parameters of printing. Issues of reproduction, sequencing, and seriality, so fundamental to printmaking, are also at the heart of her vision.

In 2013 she established her own publishing imprint, Diagonal Press, which demonstrates her exceptional commitment to printmaking. The possibilities of publishing as a format in its own right allows Auerbach to maintain artistic autonomy and independent distribution while at the same time allowing her work to reach a broader audience, which is very much within the democratic tradition of printmaking.